Japan's neo-imperialist drift

By Donald Kirk

For a people who, to superficial appearances, convey an impression of extreme politeness, calmness and all-around good manners, some Japanese in quite high places are doing their best these days to alter this image.

The Japanese have so many ways of saying, sorry, with so many gradations of feeling and emotions or coldness or hypocrisy, you would have thought that the mayor of Osaka would have made use of at least one of them to show repentance the other day in Tokyo.

But no, there was Toru Hashimoto at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan saying there was no way really of proving that the Japanese forced tens of thousands of women to service Japanese troops in the Pacific War. Earlier on his home turf of Osaka, he remarked that "a comfort woman system is necessary" to give soldiers "a rest in such a situation."

Actually, with memories of American GIs on "r & r" _ rest and relaxation, or was it recreation? ― from Vietnam in the fleshpots of Bangkok and other likely havens, one can sort of grasp what Hashimoto was saying. There is, however, a secondary theme running through his remarks. He is, or was, the darling of the Japan Restoration Party whose mission is to restore the values that made Japan great.

What exactly does that mean? Considering that the party has the backing of the oratorical flame-thrower Shintaro Ishihara, former long-time governor of Tokyo, we have to view Hashimoto's remarks as another sign of Japan's neo-conservative, maybe neo-imperialist, drift.

If Hashimoto's party, basically a fringe organization, crashes and burns, as may happen in elections for the Upper House of the Japanese Diet in July, the conservative Liberal-Democratic Party of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will be the beneficiary. If nothing else, Abe stands for a resurgent Japan returning to the days of the empire before final defeat in 1945.

The photograph of Abe, grinning and waving from the cockpit of a T4 trainer jet offered stunning evidence ― all the more startling considering the number ''731" on the fuselage. Could it really have been coincidental, as spokespeople for the Japan Self-Defense Forces insist, that the number happened to be the same as that of the awful ''unit 731" where Japanese scientists performed macabre experiments on prisoners of war?

Unit 731, hidden in Manchukuo, the puppet state that Japan created and ruled in northeastern China, represented Japanese cruelty at its sinister worst. Thousands of prisoners died from illnesses inflicted by Japanese biologists and chemists. Most of the victims were Chinese. Many were Russian. A number were from the U.S., Britain, Australia and other countries allied against Japan.

No one's accusing Abe of imperial designs on the order of the old days, but Japan is showing signs of wanting to sublimate the iniquities of the era of Japanese imperialism. One sign of the neo-imperial drift is pressure on Article 9 of the no-war ''Peace Constitution."

Article 9, renouncing war ''as a sovereign right," has been in force ever since the post-war occupation of Japan, but Japanese rightists may try to get rid of it in response to Chinese pressure on the Senkaku Islands. True, the U.S. has said that the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty means the U.S. will side with Japan on the Senkakus, but the Americans have no desire for a shooting war with China while appealing to China to rein in North Korea.

Japan's new militarism is accompanied by rationalizations for what Japan did in the Pacific War ― rationalizations mingled with denials that go far beyond Hashimoto's ill-conceived remarks about comfort women. One argument that's gaining currency is that President Franklin Roosevelt, after watching the rise of Adolph Hitler's Third Reich and the Japanese invasion of China, saw U.S. participation in the world war as necessary to revitalize the U.S. economy and win support for his administration.

The "revisionist" thinking is that Japan was ready for negotiations before the U.S. forced Japan to attack Pearl Harbor in order to fight the ABCD powers, America, Britain, China and the Dutch, after they cut off oil supplies. The debate, of course, overlooks the unspeakable cruelty of the Japanese in the Nanking massacre, in the Bataan Death March, in the slaughter of civilians in Manila in the final weeks of the war, to say nothing of the horrors of Unit 731.

Nor does Japan's record in Korea come up for much discussion. The U.S. was dangerously unconcerned about Korea, which the U.S. had ceded to Japan in the infamous Taft-Katsura deal in 1905.

The revisionists do, however, unwittingly evoke the specter of a revanchist Japan bursting with neo-imperial ambitions. Was Abe subconsciously signaling just that as he waved from a plane with the sinister "731" painted beneath the cockpit?

In that context, Hashimoto's remarks appear strangely in line with current Japanese thinking.

Columnist Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, has spent years covering both Japan and Korea for newspapers and magazines. He's at kirkdon@yahoo.com.